


Blood

by Subtle_Salieri



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: Abuse, Alcohol, Apocalyptic Event, At least (2) kind acts, Aug Incident, Augmentations, Corpses, Drugs, Dystopia, Implications, Multi, Riots, backstory fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-31 16:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8584825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Subtle_Salieri/pseuds/Subtle_Salieri
Summary: He's 25, about to graduate with honors, and works for L.I.M.B. and Vaclav Koller still struggles to free himself of the burden of being part of the Dvali crime family and of constant struggles with power, identity, and trying to be a good person in the midst of organized crime. When his college lover begins the journey to augmentation in early 2027 it leads to consequences no-one could have expected. But, shouldn't Vaclav? As the Aug Incident breaks under a cover of darkness in Prague Vaclav tries to solve the mystery of why he hasn't lost his mind while surviving... But the Aug Incident, in all its tragedy, may finally provide a way for Vaclav to be freer of the thugs that haunt him and the people he's lost to them.





	1. Plasma

**Author's Note:**

> This is set roughly concurrently with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. There's a fair bit of former/unresolved Vaclav/Ivan but the present day ship is Melissa/Ivan.

“So I’m going to get augmented, V.” 

Ivan and Vaclav had known each other ever since the latter had managed to spread out of Dvali territory and study at the university, eventually gaining employment at the largest LIMB Clinic in Prague. They studied together, both having a focus on mechanics. The sudden revelation Ivan dropped into the conversation gave Vaclav pause. 

“Wait – really?” He put down what he was reading. They were in Ivan’s car and the sun was setting. Vaclav was confused when Ivan messaged him saying he’d give him a ride home from work, but now understood why. 

“Yeah man, it’s going to make my career. After that collision last fall I’ve had these tremors that made it hard to work – But I met someone who’s going to finance some heavy augmentations. No worrying about my hands shaking inside an engine. No more pain in my knees.” He sounded so upbeat. 

“Wait – a quad? Who – who did you meet?” Quad augmentations were very unusual but gaining some popularity. Vaclav had dual arm augments, but he was born with complications, without arms, becoming the youngest augmented person in Prague in the 2010s. There were a few articles about him and a photograph of him with Hugh Darrow when he was about 10, flexing his augments. His family’s Dvali connections were graciously spared the spotlight. “Have you – talked to Melissa yet?” Ivan’s hands of flesh tightened on the wheel. 

“I did. She… She supports it. If I get augmentations, I could be head mechanic someday. Right now I’m on the bottom, the guy who got hit by a drunk. I can even get implants that let me analyze the cars I work on by glancing at them.” His smile faltered just a little bit. “I was… scared she’d dump me. But she really loves me Vaclav. And if I get augmentations, I could make more, we could afford to have children.” 

“I don’t want to be an uncle, Ivan,” Vaclav joked, still thinking about the augmentations. Ivan playfully elbowed him. 

“You’ve been augmented longer than anyone I know – I’ll probably have to go with TYM because even with help I can’t get the really boutique stuff. Do you have any recommendations?”

“Some TYM is okay, but try looking at mid-sized American biotech companies. Not Sarif, obviously, but lot of them will cut deals on hardware right now. They can’t penetrate the market like TYM, so they’ll make a deal with any customer that can find them. Isolay’s a good choice right now. I can send you more when I get home.” Vaclav stroked the metal plate in the curve of his head, underneath a wild mess of curly dark hair. He needed a haircut. It got in the way when he wanted to do maintenance. 

“Well, we’re getting drinks first,” Ivan grinned, stopping the car on the side of the road. Instead of being at the Dvali apartments that Vaclav lived in with his siblings, they were a few blocks away at the faux-Irish bar. Vaclav tried to protest but Ivan had a forceful personality, and soon the two of them, Kamil, and the youngest Koller, Vaclav’s sister Anicka, were drinking at the bar. In between drinks the three augmented people tried to answer some of Ivan’s questions. 

“Berk, baby, you’ll look great with augments. Melissa, oh, she’ll love it,” Anicka said with a drawl, knocking back a shot with her blue-and-white painted augmented arm.

“Vaclav, tell your baby sister to stop flirting with me like a client,” Ivan laughed. Vaclav shrugged sheepishly. His sister had worked in the Red Queen for several years and used a ball-jointed wrist and elbow to perform outlandish spins around the pole. Masa Kadlek was a kinder Dvali to be a soldier for than others – as Vaclav was uncomfortably aware. 

“Getting augmented was the best decision of my life,” Kamil boasted. “Everyone remembers their first augment, being better than you thought you could be, it’s a life changer. Isn’t that right, Big Koller?” 

“Yeah, Vaclav, how did you get your first augmentation?” Ivan asked. Vaclav had been playing with a beer bottle and stopped. He stopped and thought of his mother.

His mother, driving him to physical therapy every week, despite being well on the other side of Prague. His mother, a matriarchal force at a young age, raising her children as her husband moved people in and out of Prague for the Dvali. His mother, proud, but loving. His mother being extorted for sex by a pakhan dangling a new arm for her clever, sensitive oldest son. His mother being yanked by the hair, passionately kissed by a man who always carried a Tec-9 and reported directly to the top, who might have been on his way to the top. His mother, bruised the next morning, showing Vaclav the child-sized augmentation that surely had been custom-made for someone else. A few months later the pakhan returned with another tiny arm, making Vaclav a bit less lopsided and so it went as he grew, getting a bigger augment when he needed it, until his mother died of a fatal miscarriage when he was fourteen, a few months after his birthday granted him a beautiful matching set of glittering American-made arms. 

“I was very lucky,” He said. His sister, five years younger than him, never knew of the pakhan who used Vaclav as an excuse to screw another soldier’s wife, and he didn’t want her to. “Of course, I immediately tried to ruin it by ‘repairing’ it myself with a soldering wand,” he said, pushing the thoughts of his mother out of his mind. His three companions laughed, like he wanted them to. He had an empty smile that nobody noticed. 

“What if I can’t get neuropozyne one week?” 

Kamil scoffed. “You’ll be fine. We have Koller.” Ivan looked confused for a moment and then clarity struck. He lowered his voice and leaned close to Vaclav until their foreheads nearly touched. 

“Vaclav, you steal it from work?” 

“It’s a job Radich makes him do,” his sister said softly. “But he can skim off a bit off what he takes. We’ve never run out.”

Ivan shook his head. “Shouldn’t be surprised. You’re children of the Family, all right.”

“Gregori wasn’t my biological father,” Vaclav interrupted. Then he realized he hadn’t said the right thing. “I mean – you know. It’s why we can stay in the apartment. If I, if Anicka, if Elias, we all do our part for the Dvali, we’ll be just fine.” 

His sister stared through him. “Vaclav says that, but he doesn’t mean it. He hates being Dvali,” she breathed quietly to the other two. “Elias accused him of forgetting where we came from with his job at the LIMB clinic. He...” She bit her lip. “He put a gun to Vaclav’s head a few weeks ago during an argument.” 

Kamil and Ivan looked shocked. Vaclav shot Anicka a look. 

“I told you to put that out of your mind,” he scolded her. “Elias is a street-level thug soldier. He’s just acting out.” 

“You’re both my brother,” she emphasized. “I come home and Elias is shoving you against a wall with a pistol out, tearing your doctors coat, he looked… he looked like he was going to kill you. You are oldest, brother, but he is big.”

“Are you safe?” Kamil asked. Ivan remained silent, staring at Vaclav with a trace of worry.

“Elias can’t do anything. He knows it. It would be nice not to risk my job, but you know, we do what we have to. We all do. So yes, Ivan – if you need neuropozyne, ask me.” 

“I – I will. But Vaclav… I know why you never brought me home back then,” Ivan murmured, putting his perpetually-shaking hand of flesh on Vaclav’s hand of metal, “but, guns to your head? We have a spare bedr--”

Vaclav hushed him. “It’s all fine. Let’s think about your new augmentations, am I right?” 

After a while more Vaclav and Anicka walked home together, Anicka immediately going into the bathroom to hurl and take a shower. She drank too much. She did this regularly but it still worried Vaclav. 

While she was in there he noticed Elias had left a pistol on the table in front of the TV. He picked it up with his left hand, flexing hard metal fingers around a hard metal trigger. He had only shot a gun a handful of times. One of many reasons he wasn’t a foot soldier.

He looked at the news. Firebombing LIMB clinics in the United States. An attack only a week ago on Sarif Industries. He was often working at the counter and unlike many LIMB locations there was no bulletproof glass between them and their clients. If anybody attacked LIMB Praha he was surely the first victim. 

He lived ready to die. He was 25 and ready to finish a degree in biomechanics starting in the fall of 2027 with his dissertation based in part on his own self-experimentation. He could become a real augmentation doctor then, but he didn’t know whether getting such certification would only lead to Radich tightening his hold. Radich, with highly volatile moods and most of an army loyal to him. But also, Radich, who hid a leg augmentation, who sometimes spoke during the secret maintenance visits like he was Vaclav’s uncle, about his mother and Gregori. He could remember when the Koller clan were children. But he would then slap Vaclav across the room for some arbitrary reason – he was taking too long, he must have done something wrong, or suspicious. Vaclav’s pale, pale skin bruised very easily, that he had been taken aside at work the day after a visit to Radich and asked if he was “safe at home”. 

“Koller,” he remembered his supervisor saying, “We know that being augmented doesn’t mean you’re safe from abuse. You come in bruised, you never talk about your home life…” She had hugged him and forwarded him domestic abuse resources. Because of this, Vaclav’s front was that of an eccentric klutz, exaggerating his personality to avoid suspicion. He could play this fiction very well with his cranial plate – such extreme neurological augmentations were almost beyond “eccentric”. 

Anicka eventually joined him after vomiting enough and he made sure she wasn’t too sick, babying her and doing what a brother should. A semblance of normalcy. They fell asleep on the couch, Elias not returning until Vaclav was leaving the next morning. This was routine. 

Over the next few months, Ivan transitioned to augmentations and took to them surprisingly fast. Vaclav asked Melissa one time if Ivan had any depression, only to be told that augmentation seemed to wipe his slate clean. He moved up quickly at work, and had more energy than he’d had even before he’d been hit by the drunk driver. He felt much closer to Ivan now that he understood what being augmented felt like, closer than even when he spent weeks in Ivan’s dorm when they were both undergrads, him endlessly working on essays, Ivan trying to coax him to bed, kiss him tenderly, fall asleep with Vaclav in his big, warm arms. Before they fought constantly. Before he eventually became a commuter student. 

As Ivan gained energy Vaclav was sapped of it. The TV at work was now regularly tuned to that American Taggart, some kind of religious zealot. There was occasionally a small crowd of protesters outside. Two weeks from when the fall semester began, LIMB announced a major recall with a new biochip put out the door in an emergency. He began overseeing dozens upon dozens of chip replacements He was informed he should get it implanted. Then he was ordered. Biochips usually caused interference with his cranial plate – he hadn’t had the predecessor to the new chip installed at all, so he had no idea what the glitches were like. The monotony of work led to him making a key mistake while finetuning software in the cranial plate, leaving him just north of braindead until Anicka came home and found him like that. She knew enough to reboot him but it was an unpleasant, glassy experience that Vaclav wondered afterwards might compare to death. 

Even Elias was concerned when he came in. He gave his older brother whisky when he was finally alive to the world again, and asked him to be careful. Vaclav had to honor that request. 

He took the rest of the week off. He’d stolen enough Neuropozyne that finances weren’t an issue if he just took a few days. Anicka wanted to watch Panchaea coverage but Vaclav didn’t really care. 

“-- I really did fuck it up,” he said, playing with a Rubik’s cube that he genuinely didn’t know the origins of. Ivan exhaled sharply in his ear, car and mechanical sounds in the background.

“You’re brilliant, Vasek, but this is why I don’t understand your neuro augs. The ones I have are neat, tidy – the only external indication is HUD projector under my eye.”

“They’re great when they work,” he said absently. 

“Speaking of working, glad I got the chip today. The glitches were getting very bad. You’re lucky you avoided them.” Slamming in the background. “Hey, try it now! I need to be getting home!” 

Radich suddenly filled his inner ear. “I am out of neuropozyne and my leg feels stiff. Igor will bring you down. Come now, Vaclav.” 

“ – Ivan, I – “ Don’t say it or you dead, Radich will bury your body in the sewers, “ – I have to go. Let’s meet up tonight after Anicka’s shift.” 

He walked over in regular clothes – black jeans and a henley, a band t-shirt, ostentatious fingerless gloves to the point near the theater Igor tended to meet him. Before Igor it was somebody else. Who could remember? 

For all the rest of the Dvali knew Vaclav was a drug smuggler first and foremost. Nobody questioned his private visits with Radich because they knew they wouldn’t be around much longer if they did. He was, quite possibly, the only openly augmented member of the Dvali who wasn’t a prostitute, which they tolerated and Radich would sometimes use to reward him, if they got some really good augments in a shipment. When he was a boy, he had run around with many of the street-level soldiers, Elias tagging along. The Kollers did, at the very least, stick close to the family business.

He entered Radich’s offices quietly, not approaching until Radich nodded to him, and proceeded to set up his supplies on the desk. Half of the kit was tools, wiring, spare pieces, and other magpie like selections, while the rest was bandages, scalpels, and syringes. He prepared a Neuropozyne dose and administered it like all the times before he injected Radich, himself, or his patients and friends. He thought briefly of Ivan’s first Neuropozyne dose a few weeks ago, his hands shaking trying to dose himself until Vaclav gently took the syringe from him and methodically poked, pinched, and pressed. In a strange way, it was an intimacy they hadn’t had in years. Ivan hugged him after it, in a sweet and gentle way that was no longer familiar to Vaclav, until both their eyes met at the wedding ring now welded onto his right ring finger. They said nothing. 

“Koller, the fuck are you doing? Get back to work!” Radich was posed to throw an empty highball glass directly at his face but Vaclav quickly dropped the partially-dismantled hand he’d been nipping parts from, an Isolay hand, like Ivan’s new ones…

“Sir, sir, I was just thinking about how to approach the problem, there’s, there’s no need to be upset,” he pleaded quietly, his voice halfway between a panic and a whine. If a shard of glass slashed his face, it would be much harder to get past his supervisor next week, much harder to steal Neuropozyne and provide for his family. He lowered himself to the hard floor, getting out of the way, just in case.

Next he had to examine the leg to find the issue. This visit now featured a rather strange Radich, one of his more manipulative and duplicitous faces. So familial and traditional, this could turn very quickly. 

“You have your mother’s hair,” he said, distracting Vaclav from his work as a hand touched his curls. Radich was leaning over him, blocking the light, while he kneeled on the floor. While fairly accurate as far as Vaclav could remember, he couldn’t think of a reason to bring it up, until he felt the hand stroking his hair tighten and twist, yanking his head upward and forcing him to look up. 

“Nikoladze, sir, I have to focus on the limb if we want it to work again, you see, sir?” His voice sped up, afraid of what the cruel duplicity Radich used to control people had in store. Otar may have hated Vaclav, but Otar was straightforward, easy to get a read on, Radich much less so. 

After a tense moment Radich reprimanded Vaclav and released his grip, letting fingers trail down a face he’d been bruising for years. Radich’s control of Vaclav was heavily tied to fear, and tactical moments of gentleness heightened the fear and respect Radich commanded from the relatively young man.

Vaclav finished the maintainence after a fashion, and checked his phone for messages while cleaning up his tools. There were, surprisingly, none. It was after sunset, he thought surely Ivan would be home by now, or Anicka, since she was only working the early shift tonight. 

“No phones in here,” Radich’s voice was sharp. “Tell Igor we are done.” 

Vaclav put his hands up, his customary no-threat-meant-mr.nikoladze gesture, and he grabbed his toolbox, heading for the door. 

Only, there was no Igor out there. 

“Sir?” A Dvali footsoldier emerged from the hallway. 

“Koller! Get the fuck out of the way! Nikoladze needs to know what’s going on!” 

Koller protested. “The fuck’s going on?” 

“Augs are going batshit, dumbass! Hell, I wonder why you aren’t! Nikoladze, sir, we gotta shut down the Red Light District before they overrun it –“ The thug ignored Koller and proceeded into the office. Koller got online only quickly, and suddenly a world of horror he was blind to became his business. The entire world, every aug it seemed, was going mad. Video livestreams were cutting off like umbilical cords, the ignorance losing the stream induced as terrifying as entering the world for an infant. 

Koller began running out of the theater, taking every shortcut he could remember. On the street a scene met him that terrified him. He saw people who had wandered into the LIMB clinic, dependent on their expertise, months before, scratching at and killing each other, tearing up the street, attacking the unaugmented. 

His natural knees felt weak and he leaned against a wall in an alley, watching an augmented gentlemen claw out one of the eyes of a much older augmented woman going for his neck. It felt as close to the book of Revelations as a lapsed Jew like Koller could feel, a young man who, for whatever reason, was “left behind” from the uniform lapse in sanity. 

He couldn’t identify a single first thought. Family. Friends, work – he leaned his head against a metal hand, suddenly reminded of the massive cranial plate that had never had a new bioochip installed. But that was just coincidence – right?

He had been scheduled for today until he’d taken the week off. He decided to go to the LIMB clinic, dodging through streets that were dystopic warzones of people destroying each other. It was confusing, hazy, disorienting, and relentless. And as he passed the Red Queen he saw a familiar frizzy shock of black-blue hair on the ground. Unmoving.  
His heart skidded agonizingly but the rioting, manic hordes filling the streets of the Cisty District terrified him enough to keep moving. Right into a purple-haired woman on the sidewalk screaming. 

“You wanna live? Come with me! I know a good hiding place!” Well, maybe, he admitted to himself. Maybe he knew a good hiding place. Still he grabbed her wrist and pulled her behind him, ducking and dodging to avoid thrown rocks, and some bodies.  
“O—o-ook. Please, don’t hurt me.”  
They got to the L.I.M.B. clinic, which was ravaged. Vaclav didn’t need to recall the passcode to get into the building with the door pried open. The lobby was filled with corpses that he recognized, and he was nauseous. Still he jumped on the front desk and yanked off a grate in the ceiling. He boosted the girl with purple hair up first before she reprociated by pulling him up by his robotic arms, but not before he grabbed a few boxes and heaved them into the crawlspace. They might have something useful, maybe at least a few cyberboost proenergy bars or their more modern replacements, biocells, to keep him operational. He covered the hole with a piece of plywood and looked at the scared young woman he’d dragged with him. 

“I – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drag you –“

“No, it’s okay. I didn’t know what I was doing. You did. I could be dead right now without you,” she said, shuddering, her long hair falling in waves as she shook her head. She was beautiful, with an oval face and dark eyes. She didn’t really look Slavic – maybe he’d ask her later. As her hair shook he saw the telltale mark of a neuroaug peeking from underneath her hairline. He knew that the augmented were losing their minds, but was it worth questioning her now? – Maybe not. 

“Nobody hurt you out there, right? I’m – I work here, I can help if you’re hurt.” She was quiet, eyes scanning the crawlspace. He needed to get her at ease without sticking a tranquilizer in her neck. “I’m Vaclav Koller.”

“I’m – I’m Patty. I’m not from Prague, I just got here, and this happens!” She kept her voice low but the panic was evident on her face. 

“This… isn’t just happening here… I saw videos from Beijing, San Francisco – All the augmented in the world… And I don’t know why.” 

They sat in tense silence for a few minutes before Patty said the obvious.

“But not us,” she said, pointing at her forehead, his arms. He shook his head and started going through the boxes he had thrown up with them. 

“Here, eat a Cyberboost. You and your augments need energy in case we need to find a new hiding spot.” He saved a biocell to power his heavier, more complex augmentation system – which Patty tried to call him out on. 

“You’re keeping the good stuff to yourself?” She said, suspiciously. Vaclav’s expression was unreadably mixed, and he turned his head to show her the almost stupidly complicated cranial augment he’d been modding since the factory zero was installed. 

“Battery efficiency – is not the highest priority when I’m developing the augments.” 

“You mod yourself?” She whispered as she unwrapped the energy bar. 

“Since I was eight, I've been adding more and more. I was born... disabed, I guess. And the cranial aug – I installed it in college to keep up with the demands of school, … home, and… “work”. It’s what my boyfriend broke up with me over, so he said. I think it was because of the beautiful English girl who joined our program who he eventually married.” 

“That sucks.” 

“Eh, that’s what dating in college is like. Even though I had to hide my relationship with him – I felt like a normal person going to classes and dating. I lost that again I graduated and stopped going to classes, only working on my dissertation.” 

“Why?”

“Why don’t you tell me about you, Patty?” He said, abruptly changing the flow of the conversation. 

“I was a journalist major. I travel reporting on business and economics in different cities around the world. I’m real thorough. They thought I’d be perfect to cover the Aug business boom in Prague.” 

Screams outside interrupted their conversation. 

Vaclav sighed. “That might be over.” 

“I’m scared, Vaclav,” Patty murmured as Vaclav rummaged through the boxes. Neuropozyne, absolutely worth taking with them. Anti-inflammatories. Ketamine, a useful sedative. Spare biochips – his hands hesistated over those. 

“Patty, you said you just arrived in Prague – did you get the new biochip L.I.M.B. was distributing?” He asked, toying with some painkillers he was certainly pocketing. 

“No – I didn’t even know there was a L.I.M.B. clinic in the Kiss-tee district,” she said, Vaclav wincing at her foreign accent butchering the local name. He doubted his English was that good either, though. 

“You had no biochip… And it had started by the time Nikoladze and I learned… and neither of us had the biochip...” His hand hovered over the chips eventually before moving on, his heart sinking. He guessed 80-90% of the augmented of Prague had gotten the chips posthaste. Including… Ivan….

He immediately called up Ivan on his infolink. No response. He tried again and again. Not even when they were breaking up did Ivan outright ignore his calls. He tried calling Melissa instead. 

He was startled and his stomach sank at the sound of sobbing. 

“Melissa? Melissa, it’s – it’s Vaclav. Please, where’s Ivan?”

“Oh, Vaclav, he got home from work, he seemed happy and normal like he is now after the augmentations but then he began to – change – lose control of himself – But he was aware of it happening, and right before he-he could hurt me he lunged for the basement door, and locked himself in there! But I can hear him banging around in there – Vaclav what can I do?!” Her voice was desperate and strained, the voice of a woman who was beginning to re-lose the hope she had gained over the last six months. 

“It isn’t just him, Melissa. It’s… it’s most augmented people. Don’t go outside. Don’t let anyone in. Just guard the door and hopefully whatever’s – causing this – will stop… I’m sorry,” his voice trembled as she began to cry in response to that, “I wish I could do more – I’m holed up in the clinic with a woman I pulled off the streets – I haven’t contacted anyone else yet. Please, please do what I said Melissa. I’ll call every hour.” 

After a stressful few more minutes he dropped the infolink call with Melissa. Then he crossed his arms across his knees, leaned his face against them, and let out a shuddery sob. Patty reached her hand out to stroke his back, which he didn’t immediately pull away from. 

“I can’t bring muhmyself t-to call anyone else… they won’t answer… God, Ivan… I did this to him. I was with him ehvry st-step of the process…”

“You couldn’t have known something would… happen to augmented people like this.” 

“I literally overclocked my neurological systems so I can know more about augmentations than anyone else! I d-didn’t even suspect this…” He sobbed, wiping tears and snot on his sleeve.

“Here, I know it’s not as good as a biocell, but eat something. Put it on your stomach, it’ll help,” Patty offered him a Cyberboost which he looked at through tears for a second before gingerly taking and unwrapping it, taking bites that mixed with salty tears running down his cheeks. 

“I’m sorry, here I was supposed to be saving you from the crisis and-and you’re having to treat me like a child.” She put her hand, which, interestingly to Koller was mostly flesh but had a metal plate on the back of it, on his. 

“We’re riding this out together, mister. It was fate two people who weren’t affected ran into each other. Try calling another of your friends.” 

“Mister – I’m 25… jeez,” he smiled for the first time since this began. He took a deep breath. “Ok.” 

Neither of his siblings answered, and he tried not to think about the prone body he got barely a glimpse at near the Red Queen. Kamil didn’t answer. Felice, who lived overlooking the fountain near his uncle’s abandoned bookstore, didn’t answer. Kazatel, the homeless kid didn’t answer. 

“Koller?! Koller, where are you?” A young woman’s voice was on the edge of panic. “Nobody’s picking up!” His art student friend, Milena. She lived on campus at AVU. 

“I know, I know. Milena. Are you safe? You’re not outside?”

“We barricaded ourselves inside the dorm. What’s happening, Koller? It’s like a zombie movie, faces of friends not recognizing us. It’s so scary.” 

“I don’t… know exactly what, but I have… suspicions. Milena, just stay safe, I’m in the crawlspace at the L.I.M.B. with a girl I ran into on the streets. You’ll like her. You have similar taste in hair colors,” he said smiling at Patty, who blushed back. “Just please – I’m trying to call everyone I know.” 

“Who’s answered?”

“...Melissa Berk. Ivan’s… in their basement. So he’s safe.” 

“That’s it?”

“I’m sorry. I’m going to keep trying. You keep trying too. Make sure nobody seriously injures an augmented who’s lost it unless they have to. I don’t think it’s permanent. Stay safe. I love you.” 

“Have you paid attention to the Panchaea project?” Patty asked, browsing her phone. 

“What? No, I think its iron seeding would be rudimentary stopgaps at best. Why?”

She played a clip from a few hours before, on Panchaea, for him on her phone. At the end he looked at her with disbelief. 

“Darrow? Darrow doing this to us? I mean the biochips could be receiving a signal but – he invented this!” He tried to straighten up and banged his head on the ceiling. 

“When I was a kid, Darrow was a hero to a cripple like me. I met him! It was a big deal for me! Darrow can’t – He can’t have betrayed us.” 

“Then what on earth did he mean by what he said?”

Vaclav’s eyes with glazed over. “I… I don’t know,” he lied. 

The next phone call he got his friend Lucina, a conversation that went much the same as the last two. Try as he might, every augmented friend he called didn’t answered. 

“Montana Jones here, Koller, you’re not out in this shit are you?” Koller almost cried out of happiness this time. 

“Monty! You must not have gotten the biochip!” He exclaimed with joy apparent in his voice. 

“I don’t go to L.I.M.B. for anything but nu-poz, not when I can get any other augmentation shit I need smuggling at the docks. What the fuck is going on?” Koller told him the theory with the signal. 

“That’s fucking crazy. I don’t trust any of those suits but, why’d they do this? People are dying, V. I’m in the sewers to get away. And police are starting to get involved. With lethal force. I’d say fucking cops but with that carnage?” 

“I just feel so damn powerless, Monty,” Koller hissed, putting his head in his hands. “How can I figure out what’s happening in no time and there’s NOTHING I can do?” 

“Listen, you want my advice? You’re in the clinic right now, right? I’m guessing your coworkers aren’t doin’ so great.” Koller glanced down through the metal grate at the maimed corpses and grunted in confirmation.

“This has to have an end, and after that, augs are going to need a doctor in Prague. Stay alive, or I’ll fuckin’ kill you for dying on me. We’ll set you up on the blackmarket. We play our cards right… might be able to get you away from the Dvali too. Your mother’s brother owns property in Prekazka, right?” 

“You’re a pretty fucking smart smuggler, Monty.” 

“That’s why I’m still in business, V. Tell this purple-haired chick to make sure you don’t an hero yourself.” Koller glanced at her, making her own fruitless phone calls. 

“...Right.” 

“Gotta go, I think I hear something. Stay smart.” He hung up before Koller could say goodbye. 

Koller sighed, and took his turn trying to provide comfort, putting an arm around Patty. He was starting to cramp from the small space and was thinking about taking some of the pain pills. He needed to numb his body. He offered some to Patty, who hesitated but took one. They shared a bottle of water Patty had in her bag. 

“This must have been a beautiful place to work,” she said, looking down at the furnishings.

“It was a great job. I would have loved any job that got me out of Dvali territory but here.. I helped people.” 

“So you’re like, in debt to the local crime family?” 

He looked away. “It ran in the family. We all did our part. Before university I think I became the only person to have a shouting match with Radich Nikoladze and not be executed immediately afterward. The years I spent on campus in my boyfriend’s dorm were the happiest of my life. I could never bring him home… The phrase, ah 'black sheep' I think describes how the Dvali feel about me...” 

“So you don’t like women at all?” 

“No… I dated a few after Ivan left me for Melissa. It was a messy breakup. I think I had too much baggage for a lot of them… I was a pretty young wo--, well, some Dvali liked to do some... nasty things promising they wouldn't hurt my siblings... It was --” Patty put a finger to his lips, cutting him off. 

“I understand. I got blackmailed by the boys on the sports teams in school into doing terrible things, I had counseling for years – it’s about power. It’s scary.” 

“My baby sister’s worked full service at the Dvali strip club since she was 16 – my brother’s been toting a gun for them since the same age. I probably would have ended up working in the Red Queen too, it could have... But I was so precocious and ambitious, I wanted something... more than the 'family business'.” This reminded Koller to try to call them again, to no success. He sighed, feeling the opioids beginning to kick in. He leaned his head on Patty’s shoulder. 

“How many hours has it been?”

“Since we got in here or it starting?”

Koller shrugged. 

“Over 8 – look at the moon in the sky. It’s beginning to set. The sun’ll rise.” 

“How many people have you called, uh, Vaclav?”

“Everyone I know I have permission to call.” Seeing Patty’s confusion, he explained. “Some people who outrank you in the Dvali you don’t have permission to call. You have to call their Pakhan and they relay the message. But I don’t care how many Dvali I’m not related to survive this.” 

Koller’s attention began to weave in and out of consciousness, his bloodshot eyes drooping until suddenly the sun glinted off the shattered glass motif-turned-property-damage in an irritating way and Patty was shaking him. 

“I was worried you took too many pain pills, but Vaclav I-I… I think it’s over.” He snapped up – hitting his head again – and shoved the plywood covering the opening with his foot. He stuffed as many supplies, nupoz, etc. into his toolbox and hefted it down, then lowering himself and chivalrously helping Patty down from the crawlspace. With a grim duty he checked the bodies of his co-workers, because he knew many of them had begun carrying self-defense weapons since attacks on clinics began. He found a spring-assisted stiletto, a stun gun, and three cans of mace. 

“Which do you want?” He asked Patty while trying not to vomit after looking into his co-worker’s dead eyes by mistake. She looked back at him in confusion. “It might not be safe out there yet. Here, neither of us know how to fight with a knife I’m guessing. Do you know how to use a stun gun?” 

“I’ll – I’ll doublefist the pepper spray. You handle the stun gun. You’ve been around guns since, uhm, you’re in a gang?” She said, and they shared an uneasy smile. 

“Yeah. That’s me. Gang guy. Like in your American movies, uyobok,” he said, exaggerating his accent and holding the stun gun sideways. They both almost burst out laughing. 

“I’m from Canada.” 

“Your Canadian movies? All right, time for seriousness, I hope Canadians can throw down.”

She did laugh that time, and looked outside. “There aren’t any people but corpses… Where are we going?”

That was a good question. Melissa must be terrified if they both survived the night at the Berk house but that was quite far. Maybe getting this foreign girl off the streets – the apartment? No, Dvali normally don’t allow houseguests – 

He suddenly remembered, snapping out of his haze, the curly hair draped across the entrance to the Red Queen, attached to a body he couldn’t remember any features of. 

“The Red Light District,” he declared and proceeded onto the street without waiting for Patty’s opinion. She crept behind him, each hand ready to squeeze the triggers on the canisters. 

“Wait, why?”

“Anicka – The Red Queen is near where we met – please, I’ll get us somewhere safer but I must check.”

A few people were alive on the street, some of them wailing in horror or pain or both, some of them slumped against the wall, their heads darting to look at any movement. Vaclav waved the gun at ones that looked a little too aggressive. Finger off the trigger. He did know what to do if you didn’t want to shoot someone. 

Half the storefronts were completely smashed, the other half barricaded with shipping containers, tables, fridges. He assumed there were survivors inside the barricades but he wasn’t going to start surprising people who might have real guns just yet. They just needed to make it – oh good, nobody had bothered to close the gates to the Red Light District. Vaclav had some fairly creative paths to commute from the Dvali controlled apartments to the clinic when the gates were shut. 

The Red Queen was only half a block away now. His walk slowed. 

“Vaclav, you have to keep going,” Patty insisted, waving the pepper spray in every direction.

“I know I know I know, just…” He inhaled and exhaled, and walked purposefully towards the doors of the Red Queen. There was a multitude of corpses here and it wasn’t hard to figure out that in the panic to get off the streets several people had stampeded others to death. And then he saw the hair. Elias was the only child who didn’t inherit their mother’s hair, which he was quite jealous of when they were children. He looked from the hair to the right shoulder – which was ball jointed, unmistakable. 

“Anicka?” He didn’t know why he said her name. She wasn’t going to hear him. She wouldn’t knock back one too many shots again or practice lapdances to music he played at home while tinkering, Sex Pistols and the Cure and Gorillaz, all music that would never play in the Red Queen. She wouldn’t poke him in the nose and whisper that he was her favorite brother ever again. Ask him about his brief stint in student government at university and say she wanted to run the Ministry of Sex. 

He sank to his knees, now a bit ripped from the activities of the last day. He turned her over. There were ugly wounds on her face and neck, but he could still see a trace of her personality. He looked farther down her body – thank God, her pants were firmly anchored on her hips. At the very least, there were no signs she was used before or after her death to satisfy some pervert. People knew that groping Anicka Koller during her set led to the only cooperation Elias and Vaclav would do – make visits as the gun toting goon and the sadistic scientist to scare the shit out of the perpetrators. 

Was she murdered, he wondered as he moved the hair out of her face, or did somebody kill her in self defense? He oversaw her biochip installation himself, because she still was afraid of doctors, and as she sat in the white doctors’ chair he held her right hand with both of his, reassuring her throughout the process, teasing her with jokes about getting her a lollipop. He actually slipped her a little ketamine because she was whining all her friends had done K-holes but her, she only had cocaine when she was partying. He didn’t know whether she had used it yet.

He reached for her flesh hand, cold and limp, and held it. He put his arms around her, noting other things that reassured him – nobody had ripped out her earrings or belly button ring for cash, and while the wounds on her face were nasty they didn’t make her face unidentifiable. 

20 years old and Hugh Darrow killed her. Vaclav killed her. Someone incredibly knife happy killed her. He started to weep openly in the street, not caring if the rest of Prague had begun to come out after the night of horrors. Patty crouched down and used a pack of tissues to wipe away his tears before he shook his head away. 

“Vaclav...” 

He sobbed. He had a strong suspicion that Elias was also dead, for the streets were so covered with corpses. But they had never been close. After their mother died his sister wouldn’t be more than a room away from Vaclav for four months. She insisted on sleeping in the same bed and followed him to school, which led to her punching some students five years older than her when they mocked the two Kollers. 

“I’m sorry, Anicka,” he whispered. 

“She was my best dancer,” came a voice. And down from the manager’s office to survey the destruction was Masa Kadlek herself, flanked by her sons and some of the surviving dancers, who, when they saw Anicka’s body, started crying themselves, some of them touching Vaclav’s shoulder. 

Vaclav tried to speak but he found no words. He wanted to lash out but he knew the chaos meant none of these people could have prevented her death. But maybe if he hadn’t gotten sentimental or angered Radich he would have left earlier and he would have been here and he could have protected her like he was always supposed to. 

Masa Kadlek spoke again. “Mr. Koller, the Red Queen will personally pay to bury her at the graveyard by river Vltava next to your mother. And if Elias’ body is found, it will be interred there as well.” 

When Vaclav found he could speak again his voice was hoarse. “Vltava – you knew mother was Jewish.” The ceremony was extremely private when she had died. 

“Gregori couldn’t resist marrying a non-Georgian, despite all my best efforts. But your mother was one I could respect. She was a true mother. And she raised children to be proud of. And to lose your sister is to lose a part of her all over again.” 

Vaclav’s phone began ringing inappropriately. He knew he had to answer it, but he didn’t want to let go of Anicka, until the oldest Kadlek boy, behaving the gentlest Vaclav had ever experienced a gangster to be, pulled her body away delicately, cradling her limp form in his rather brutish arms. 

“I know your tradition requires somebody is with the body at all times. But you have many augmented messes to clean up today, if I know you, and I have known you for over 20 years, Vaclav. The Dvali and the Queen were her family too, and we will stay with the body.”

“We called so many people last night Vaclav, you need to answer...” Patty trailed off as he took the phone out of his pocket and threw it at her. She understood he wanted her to answer it, but it still felt off. Eventually she did. 

Vaclav stood, reached out and closed her eyes, finally, with his pointer and ring finger. Something he hadn’t done was paint designs on a limb yet, which Anicka always told him he should do. 

The next arm he replaced, he would add blood. Her blood. 

“I expect that a ‘favor’ will be requested of me in time. You have too many bodies to clean up today to spend so much on the children of a low level soldier.”

“You are now one of the only aug doctors in Prague?” 

Vaclav numbly nodded his head. 

“I think you’ll pay back any expense in time.” The old woman, stern, ruthless, looked genuinely sad as she looked at Anicka. “Vaclav…”

“Yes.” 

“I am a mother,” she said softly, sadly. “For the last ten years, Anicka was one of my daughters.I would have had you as my daughter or son, too.”

“Uhm, Vaclav? It’s that, Melissa woman,” Patty said nervously. 

Vaclav took Masa Kadlek’s spindly hand and kissed the wedding ring that was, at this point, probably purely symbolic, and he said quietly, “Thank you, Kadlek. I regret I wasn’t there to save her.”

“Go and save the rest of your kind, boy.” 

He breathed in, breathed out, and picked up his toolbox. He took back his phone from Patty. 

“If you’re coming, it’s a long trip.” 

The small crowd outside the Red Queen parted for them as they left the Red Light District.


	2. Iron Hearts Beating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally touching base with his remaining loved ones, a plan begins to coalesce in Koller's brain, based on nothing but an instinct for survival and a couple of hunches and hopes.

Many years ago, Ivan had put a downpayment on a house. It was in the western part of the city, in a pretty nice neighborhood. It had a fenced-in yard, extra large workspaces in the garage and basement for a couple of mechanics, lovely wood floors. He could move in by senior year, and after graduation he would carry his new spouse over the threshold and finally they’d be happy. 

It worked out more or less that way. 

 

Vaclav had been the house a merely handful of times because to get there you needed to cross a bridge that was notoriously often closed to foot traffic because of drunk drivers causing accidents on it. It was once rumored that one of the COO’s of Palisade had gone directly from Ludevik’s bar in Palisade Square to a three-car crash that killed four people. The COO never saw court. 

Today the crashed cars littering the bridge were plainly not from drunkenness. As Vaclav and Patty began to work their way across the street to the bridge in the late morning sun, Patty tugged’s Vaclav’s sleeve and pointed to a newsvid screen that haunted him with a third-person view of what had happened two hours ago, Vaclav’s thin figure collapsed to the sidewalk on his knees holding Anicka’s body, the agony and tears apparent on his face (hers was blurred), with the headline: PRAGUE AWAKENS TO AUGMENTED ANGUISH. He immediately stared straight ahead to the bridge. 

“Picus works fast. I always heard rumors their corporate apartment was near Davny.”

“Vaclav, you haven’t talked since we began to make our way across the entire City Central.”

“We need to save energy. Keep your mace out just in case,” he said, on the borderline of ordering. 

“Vaclav, that was your sister, you can’t –“ He turned around and smacked her empty hands. 

“I said pepper spray out!” He resisted the urge to shout just barely. 

“Yes, I can do that, and you know why? Because that will not be the first family or friend’s corpse I discover today! I have to live with the fact I couldn’t protect any of them. That me being augmented encouraged many of them. That I personally installed their biochips and cowered in the place I did that as they lost their minds and lives. Now --” He said, turning back to the bridge and dragging Patty across the street by the arm. 

“I can’t find a corpse in their house. If I lost both of them today…I’d… I’d have nobody to care about protecting from the Dvali but myself,” he whispered this realization, and stopped in his tracks as he observed an 18-wheeler creaking on the edge of the bridge, teetering in a perpetual fall, but never hitting the water. It was horrifyingly beautiful, making a logarithmic spiral against the horizon. 

“What?” He put a finger to his lips and crept to the other edge of the bridge, trying to step carefully, unsure what could trigger a cascade of twisted metal into the shallows of the river. It took them five minutes, but the truck hadn’t percievably moved when they got what Vaclav thought was a safe distance away. The rest of the bridge had a few small fires in engines but they were otherwise clear, he figured. 

“How were you protecting people from the Dvali?” Patty asked, pulling her hair out of her face which relieved some of Vaclav’s anxiety about someone pulling it in if they had to fight. “You weren’t that important to the Dvali, were you?” 

“You know how I mentioned letting foot soldiers do – things to me?” 

“Yes,” Patty said very softly as they passed a charred corpse hanging out of a car window. 

“I was ok doing that, to protect them. They'd have been -- hurt. I was important to the boss man, Radich, so nobody could rough me up too bad, and I always would be, so I would be ok, but Elias and Anicka was younger... Not even teenagers when our mother died. But for the last couple years the foot soldiers who use to… hurt me were trying to find the name of the boy I had been with in university. If they had, they taunted me sometimes, telling me these... heinous things to him, slash his throat in front of me, that was a favorite. They’d tell me this plan all the time to try to scare me, make me slip any details about him.” He said this so matter of factly, even checking the number of rounds in the stun gun as they walked. 

“… Melissa’s husband was that boy,” Patty said, the realization dawning on her. 

“I thought I told you that last night,” Vaclav said, embarrassed now he had shared as much as he did about his… role. He only told one person the painful, intimate details of that unpleasantness, and that was Ivan. 

“I --- you told me lots of things last night. I missed a few. So… You still have feelings for Ivan, don’t you?” She asked. 

Vaclav sighed. “Recently… they had, begun to redevelop. Distracting me. But he and Melissa were so happy. And I need to make sure they stay happy,” he said firmly as they entered the residental neighborhood and Vaclav traced his steps back to where their house was. More people were on the streets of the residental neighborhood, looking for family members who disappeared in the night, burying pets who were killed last night, calling emergency services to get a dial tone. 

“There,” he pointed. He ran up to the door and knocked on it, softly and then harder. Melissa opened the door a few seconds later, her face severe and aged overnight. She put her arms around him and pulled them into the house before locking the door again. 

“Vaclav, I’m so sorry about your sister – I never met her, but Ivan spoke fondly of her...” 

“It’s… OK. He stopped making noise a few hours ago?” He asked, setting down the stun gun and walking towards the basement door. 

“I fear the worst but I – I wasn’t strong enough to look alone.” 

“I’m here now. With any luck he’s just… unconscious. Asleep,” Vaclav added almost lamely. Melissa reached to the doorknob, and with a click, the lock popped out and the door opened. 

Ivan had aspired to a workshop like the basement, which was now in ruins. The slits of windows at the top of the walls that peeked over the yard were shattered, many of the tools destroyed. Ivan lay facedown on the floor, his arms and legs… damaged. Vaclav almost tumbled down the stairs and Melissa cried out when she saw Ivan. 

“It’s ok, it’s ok, I think – he only damaged his augmentations.” Vaclav turned over the second body of the morning and unzipped the jacket Ivan was wearing, putting his fingers on Ivan’s neck and using his other hand to fiddle with some programming in his cranial plate. With a little of his mod magic he could get a resting heartbeat. 

“Melissa, he’s alive. I just don’t know how I should wake him up.”

“Any way you can!” She pleaded, and Vaclav had to explain to her it wasn’t that simple, if he had hurt his brain during his delusions he might not ever wake up. Melissa sank to her knees crying, and echo of Vaclav’s own actions over Anicka, and he wanted to join her. But he instead looked around, trying to figure out how Ivan had occupied himself in the nightmare. He assumed Ivan tried to take his arms and legs off using the tools, based on the dents in his blade-like feet, the pieces of artifical dermis stripped from his forearms. But he also saw Ivan’s phone on the floor. He picked it up, not believing that he’d kept the same phone for, what, half a decade? 

He probably never changed the passcode – Vaclav guessed that correctly, typing in Ivan’s first dog’s birth year, 2001 – and it unlocked to a list of video files on the phone, titled, “Vaclav”. Vaclav confusedly clicked the first video. It was a video Vaclav vaguely recalled from the first semester he lived with Ivan. Vaclav was lounging on the bed, smoking marijuana from a vaporizer, shirtless but wrapped up in the duvet. 

_“Pretend like I’m interviewing you. So when we’re apart, I can watch this and be reminded of you.”_

__

__

Video Vaclav took an inhale on the vaporizer. “Okay,” he shrugged. 

_“What do you like?”_

__

__

_“Marijuana. University.” A bit lip. “Ivan.”_

__

__

_“Why do you like Ivan?”_

__

__

_“Because.. he’s nice. He lets me work in his dorm and sleep with him. He's so... sweet...” Another inhale._

__

__

_“What do you do with Ivan?”_

__

__

_“Everything, because I love him and without him… I wouldn’t be anything.”_ The audio was barely distinguishable at that point and watching who he was, sad, meek, was overwhelming, so Vaclav skipped to the next video. It was Ivan’s dorm again. Vaclav was wearing reading glasses and one of Ivan’s t-shirts and had a ring on his finger that he’d drilled through and put a bolt on so it wouldn’t slide around but he could remove it when he went home. 

_“Another video, Ivan? We have to work before we play.”_

_“I would never film us doing that.” Vaclav giggled but then looked a little sad. Ivan’s voice interrupted again._

__

__

_“You know I would never, not after –“_

__

__

_“I know. I just – I have to finish designing the cranial plate. Why don’t you film me later?”_

__

__

_“But if I forget I won’t have a video when you go… ‘home’ later this week.” Vaclav looked directly into the camera, his usually squinting eyes wide enough behind lenses to catch a sparkle of violet in the iris that Ivan claimed was always there._

__

__

_“I wouldn’t let you forget. And.. you’ll have to keep the ring. I can’t… I can’t be wearing it there. Ivan, they’d hurt you so bad –“ Ivan’s hand reached into the frame, shushing Vaclav._

__

__

_“I just care about you not suffering more...”_ He hit skip. 

Patty leaned over the phone. “Vaclav, you’re crying. What is this?” 

“It’s… videos I thought he’d long since deleted… Why would he have opened these in his hallucinations...” 

_Another Vaclav, working at a laptop, his hair shorn short showing off the very earliest stage of his cranial mod._

_“If we moved to the house there’s only so long before they’d find us… and I couldn’t take the position with L.I.M.B. It’s in the Cisty District in Prague.”_

__

__

_“Then don’t. You can stay home and tinker.”_

__

__

_“But if we ran away to Vienna like the person in the support group suggested, we’d be free.” Vaclav looked at the cellphone and frowned, seemingly unaware he was being filmed. “I don’t tinker. Ivan. I’m pushing the overclock on this plate, making it modular – I am working on the next generation of neurological interfacing.”_

__

__

_“I didn’t mean – I just want to carry you over the threshold, take you up to the master bedroom, and – worship every part of your perfect body.”_

Vaclav hit skip and muttered, “’I know where you’d skip,’” before the video could, remembering Ivan’s disbelief when Vaclav brushed him off. The last video was at the start of their senior year and had shaky, terrible camerawork, but it was outside their dorm. Ivan called hello to a nervous-looking Vaclav, and embraced him before letting go and pulling him inside. 

_“Vaclav, come on, look up at me,” Ivan coaxed, Vaclav buried in a scarf and his regrowing hair. “Please, look at me.”_

_“I – I can’t.”_

__

__

_“I want to capture your beautiful face as we start the last year of this. Then we can get married. In Prague or Vienna, I don’t care, I’ll do anything for you –“ the camera stopped shaking over a flesh-colored smudge on Ivan’s jacket._

__

__

_“Vaclav – Koller. Look at me,” Ivan’s voice begged, a door shutting, the two of them alone in the laundry room. Vaclav sat on the washer. “Is that-- you shaking or the washer?” Ivan tried to joke._

__

__

_“Please.” Ivan’s arm, grabbing Vaclav’s scarf, Vaclav only halfheartedly protesting._

__

__

_“Fine. You caught me. Film my ‘beautiful’ face.” Vaclav looked camera, this time, a dark splotch having appeared on his cheek. He took the scarf and ruined it with makeup, exposing a face so bruised it looked corpse-like, like a peach kicked around by animals and rotted. The bruises extended down his neck. He turned his head and showed the tender flesh around the plate, reddened.“I thought Anicka’s makeup could trick you.”_

__

__

_“They know about you now. They don’t know who you are. But they did everything they could to punish me for having a boyfriend.”_

__

__

_“How did they...”_

__

__

_“Not with the fucking camera.”_ The video ended and another one began. Vaclav paused this one and went back to the menu, trying to solve the mystery. Melissa also had a file folder of Ivan’s home videos. 

“Vaclav, what’s on his phone? Have you figured out what he did to himself last night? Please, I want him to wake up,” she sobbed. 

“His phone just adds to the confusion… He had opened videos of me from years ago… He filmed you too when you got into a relationship, right?” Melissa nodded. 

“All the time. I never understood it. With you, I’m sure it made him feel better when you were ‘home’… But he did it with me too.” Melissa paused. “I didn’t steal him from you. I felt terrible when I realized...” 

Vaclav shook his head. “I pushed him away. I found any reason to doubt his love.” He kneeled next to Ivan, fidling with his cranial plate to use his left fingers to take detailed, accurate medical information. He leaned his head again Ivan’s chest, feeling it rise and fall. 

Then he felt Ivan’s twisted limbs wrap around him. 

“You survived!” Ivan began crying. 

“Me?” Vaclav asked, muffled against his chest. “The three of us have been trying to figure out what happened here, how to get you conscious again – there he was, I was right, SLEEPING!” 

“When I got in last night suddenly my mind started saying things to me like… “You could throw Melissa across the room”… I wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a suggestion… I lost my mind last night Vaclav, and I felt sure it was to do with augments.” 

“It was. Almost all augmented, everyone with a new biochip, they all had the same hallucinations as you… Anicka’s dead,” Vaclav blurted out as Ivan held him intimately close, uncomfortable he was in this position and not the man’s wife. Ivan finally let go of him and Vaclav hid his blushing face. 

“No… oh, Vasek, I’m so sorry...” 

“It’s okay. It would have been worse if you had been dead down here, too...”

“I wouldn’t leave you and Melissa alone… Who is this lady?” Ivan asked, point a twisted finger at Patty. “Forgive me… I seem to have prevented myself from standing,” he said, gesturing to the broken legs. 

“I’m – I’m Patty. Vaclav saved me during the riots. For a second I – thought we were going to have to inject you with adrenaline to wake you up.” 

“That’s not how it works...” Vaclav chided. Ivan embraced his wife on the destroyed floor and Vaclav averted his gaze, somewhat jealous. Melissa hadn’t even needed Vaclav there, and Ivan was fine… Not like Anicka… Well…

“I have to get work done on you, Ivan. Your arms, your legs…”

“Who else is dead?” 

“I – I don’t know. A lot of people, Ivan...” 

“My arms and legs can wait. Here, just… help me up to the couch.. I keep my hunting rifle in a safe, Melissa can go get it, I’ll guard us from any looters.” Vaclav was shorter than Ivan by about three inches, but Isolay augments were fairly lightweight to afford them flexibility. Patty got his other side and Melissa said she’d go get the gun. They slowly worked their way across the destroyed workshop, Ivan looking regretfully as they passed each broken tool. The trio made it up the stairs and sat Ivan down on the couch. Ivan scuffed the bent, blade-like foot on the hardwood floors he had once danced across with Vaclav when they visited the house for the first time, a memory Vaclav always had return to him when he saw hardwood. 

“Vaclav, please, sit next to me,” Ivan asked.

“I-- OK, I will. Patty – can you… get my toolbox from downstairs…?” 

“Sure,” she said, and excused herself. Ivan took his hand with horribly bent knuckles that went backwards, broken casing, a wrist lolling to one side due to a gouge begun but incomplete, only an inch or so deep, and he tried to intwine his fingers with Vaclav’s. 

“Tell me some good news. Anything.” 

Vaclav tried to think of what could make Ivan happy.

“Well… last night Radich decided not to hit me when I was meeting with him.” 

“I was so scared in my moments of lucidity that you’d lost your mind too, and those Dvali thugs had killed you, or stripped you of your augments and caged you like an animal… After a while my body was too exhausted to destroy itself and I lay with my face drooling against the floor like a dog, and I – I managed to watch videos of you and Melissa, and I knew, I knew I had to survive this for those people.”

“I can’t believe the things you filmed…” 

“I didn’t want to lose any of you if each time I said goodbye to you on the metro was the last time I saw you. I’m sorry.” 

“This is inappropriate, you’re married,” Vaclav protested weakly as Ivan put the other broken hand on Vaclav’s waist. 

“It always scared me how thin you were… When I found you frozen half to death next to that dumpster and I realized it was you, who’d I’d been thinking about from class… I wanted so bad to sweettalk you, and bed you that I hadn’t realized how out of touch with reality you were until the night I upset you, months later… Anyone could see you were... I should have stopped when you assumed I would force you to sleep with me… And that this idea wasn't upsetting to you… And somehow you forgave that and you loved me for years...” 

“Without you, Ivan, my life would be worse. We… made mistakes. And I pushed you away in the end… And it’s over. The hallucinations are over but… we are over.” 

Ivan kissed him and after a second Vaclav responded with his own lips, the image of Ivan’s throat slit and bleeding all over Vaclav like in the threats from what felt like decades ago after the last day. It felt so wrong, kissing a married man in a house that was bought for the two of them in another life… 

Patty and Melissa met in the hallway, Melissa holding the gun awkwardly, like a baby, Patty holding Vaclav’s toolbox with a certain unease. 

“I… I don’t want to interrupt them,” Patty said. 

“I already did, once. I should… let them have a moment…” Melissa said regretfully. 

“Back in university, I was the one who I guess... made Ivan think that Vaclav had been pulled into the Machinegod cult… I didn’t mean to, I honestly thought he was in a cult… But the church was just where he worked on hobbies or grabbed a hot meal, it was different than we all assumed... I didn’t know he was a slave to the Dvali crime family. But that was the point of no return for them. Vaclav thought Ivan didn’t trust him anymore, and Ivan came to me for comfort after Koller left, and within a few months he was carrying me like I know he had wanted to do with his previous lover… I know my ring belonged to Vaclav, because there’s a hole drilled in the bottom.” 

Patty looked at a woman who she herself had underestimated as a hysterical housewife. Melissa was stony-faced and clutching the rifle tighter with each passing second. Neither woman was used to being around strangers so unprepared, unpolished and open, and Melissa found it overwhelming, striding back to her husband. Patty followed, less confident, nervous.

It was Vaclav who broke the kiss. Not because he didn't like it. Not because he didn't need it. But he didn't want to hurt Melissa. This was over. 

He tried to work on the damage Ivan had done to his prosthetics but Ivan himself just kept talking, mourningfully, longingly, distracting him, and damages were extensive. He'd somehow managed to damage the PEDOT array on his right arm, which meant he was running on borrowed time before rejection. 

Then again, after such a cataclysm, they probably all were living on borrowed time. 

Melissa brought the weapon and a box of bullets and propped them next to Ivan on the couch, Ivan nodding to her, simultaneously relieved to see her and a bit ashamed. 

"We're going to need to replace this arm entirely," Koller muttered to himself.

"What? How? You said the LIMB was destroyed," Melissa said, collapsing on the couch next to Ivan. He put his arm around her, albeit in a wonky, odd position to the damage.

Dead colleagues faces flashed in Koller's mind. "There's... probably a couple survivors who weren't working that day... and weren't... caught up in...." he trailed off, thinking of working at LIMB, the beautiful, shining vision of the future maybe not to his aesthetic, but incredible all the same. His mother took him to the opening of the first LIMB clinic in Prague when he was young, him hamming it up showing his strong little arms off, the photo they took of him with the founders of LIMB. 

"Well -- and there's still equipment probably, right?" Patty asked. "We got nupoz and a lot of drugs, and some... stuff I'm sure Vaclav --" there was the hard C again -- "knows how to use. And probably operating tables, and equipment for diagnostics... We just need to get it out of there. Like you talked to Monty about."

"Oh, right." Of course. The building was a wreck but the upper floor operating suites would have some good equipment. 

"Monty's doing OK?" Ivan asked. Koller shrugged. 

"Got a few texts after I talked to him. Slow. He went to the sewers."

"But he didn't --" Koller casually shook his head, haunted inside, not wanting to think about their friend's paranoia about LIMB having been right all along, 

"He's fine. I actually need to call him," he said while he finished the repairs he could make without more equipment. Ivan seemed uneasy when Koller stood up, but didn't protest particularly. He was still worn ragged. 

Monty's infolink wasn't recieving audio. Pretty strange. He tried sending him a text. That worked.

 **Infolink fubar, fell down a hole. Can we meet up.** "How strange," Koller muttered quietly. 

**_Sure. but I need a functional right arm. Ivan's PEDOT array is destroyed. He'll start rejecting it in a few days._ **

Hiking out of the sewers Montana Jones' heart was still racing to keep up with the last day. He pulled a beanie farther down over his eyebrows while trying to process this request Koller texted him. 

**Shipments are not going to be approachable right now if any made it yesterday at all. Trying to think of another source. The LIMB is too exposed to visit right now in daylight.**

**_Wait. Can you get to Prezkazka district? Capek fountain near where we discussed?_ **

**I can get there.** Monty wasn't going to ask questions over insecure text client. He figured out where this drainage came from and started reorienting himself to get to Prezkazka. 

Koller promised repeatedly that he'd be back, and that he needed Patty to stay with the Berks. He still felt like a jerk while he faulted over the walls that kept people off the railroad tracks. This idea wasn't the most solid plan, but it might be necessary in the long run, and definitely was to keep Ivan from undergoing rejection. He'd be surprised if any of the parts in the block apartment were left there. 

He found Monty by a newsstand across from the Zelen block. They hugged each other. Prezkazka had some destruction but most of the augs who lived her were probably at work in other parts of the city when it hit. 

"So... I know the bookstore's here, but how will coming here find us an arm?" 

Koller looked away. "MachineGod has a tenant house here," he answered, and pulled Monty along with him to the gate. 

"Sorry, the singularity cult?" Monty questioned. 

"Shh!" It was a bit more complex than that but Vaclav didn't have the time to explain it. Josef had peeked his head out and was walking over. 

"Koller, you're all right?" He asked, hand hovering over the button to let them in. 

"Yes Brother Josef, I'm sorry to drop by but -- I thought maybe I could discuss an important matter with you in the wake of last night," he said, a little sadly. 

He opened the gate and pulled them in quickly before closing it again. 

"I'm -- I'm sorry, did you have..." Koller realized how many rooms were occupied in the block. 

"Only a few of us here lost control -- people who went outside the church for work, which usually means at least one LIMB visit. I'm guessing -- you saw the broadcast?" Josef asked, ushering them through an assembled group trying to feed people. Two body bags however, had been occupied. Koller nodded at the question.

"I'm so sorry. Though -- it looks like this was the safest building to be in." 

"Then I weep for how badly the rest of the world was scarred." 

Monty was getting noticeably uncomfortable with this whole matter. "Well, Koller told me we had to drop by here..." 

"Oh, Josef, right. We're here with a -- proposition. This is, ah, Montana Jones, he's a skilled scrapper," Koller introduced before immediately vaulting into his pitch. He'd formulated it on the way over. "I'm simply thinking about the future of the augmented. There are... not many LIMB techs still alive here. But I know the abandoned bookstore across from the arts' collective is family -- Mother's family," he clarified hastily as he didn't want to imply this was a Dvali operation. "And it's a good place to hide a clinic, I'll bet. A lot of the equipment in the LIMB is still functioning, and I'll need parts and chemicals. If you..." Here was where he paused. Josef watched him for a second and Monty was feeling downright claustrophobic in the crowded space -- a rec space on the second floor they'd walked to. 

"This sounds reasonable so far, Vaclav, finish your thought. Get into that space in your mind, like when you were younger," Josef gently urged. 

"Right. Sorry. But listen... I want to work out a plan with you for that cos you know I've been the best at this in Prague for years, maybe if the Church can help transport things or obtain things we need but... But right now -- I have a friend with an Isolay 876D he trashed the pedot array on last night... do you know if you have any similar models and i'll... pay for it, trade anything, I just can't -- he can't undergo rejection now." Koller was hunched over, repeatedly interlocking his fingers, looking completely haggared. 

"D2 or D3 for hand styles?" 

Koller blinked. "D2." 

"Yes, we should have a few you can look over. Mr Jones? Could you go with Andrej and get those?" Monty took a chance to take a breath and nodded to the young devotee Josef pointed to. "And don't worry -- the cost will be part of negotiating for the help moving equipment and stocking the clinic that I could feel you working your way up to asking for." 

"Wow, thanks -- I mean, anyone of the church will be treated no questions no cost. This... the arm is for Ivan," he said very quietly. 

"Never thought he would go for augmentations." 

"It was only a few months ago..." Koller bit the inside of his cheek. "But, I mean, I'll provide any service I can free -- "

"I would like your help with a bit of design and software programming. For a cranial piece we would be able to fabricate." 

"Oh, sure... I absolutely could do that..." Koller said, agreeing to anything. He didn't need to be a believer; They chose to believe in his skill. 

Josef looked severe in a way that shook him, quite suddenly. “Koller… This event was a sign… We cannot perfect ourselves until we abandon vestiges of the former human….” 

Another sermon. “Josef – For now… I have lost the last of my family that cared to be my family. Your aspirations and faith are strong, and admirable… But I just want my friends to be in less pain. And… I am sure the pain will only get worse.” 

The raw grief on his face left them both silent as his words hung in the air, until Monty returned with the acolyte carrying several arms of the same model. Vaclav immediately snapped back to normalcy, or a fascimilie of it. 

“Oh, these are excellent,” he began to gush, half to flatter the man he had made a deal with and half out of genuine delight, always impressed by how the Mekhaniks of the MachineGod maintained even their spares and castoffs. After a moment he selected one, and shook hands with Josef before the older man pulled him into a warm, almost paternal hug that felt strange to Koller. Josef and other children of the Machine had been some of the only people who had been kind to him as he struggled in his early 20s, trying to go legit and escape the Dvali before realizing how nothing short of a miracle – or now, he supposed, a calamity – could ever been seen as a way out. They had encouraged him to push his modular design philosophy and some even were part of the team that worked on installing the plate. 

He could take a little affection where he could get it, even if it was the group obsessed with the ultimate ascension into the god of the cybernetic. 

They left quietly, after not too long, Monty carrying what would soon be Ivan’s arm. Koller seemed wistful, but desperate not to think about it. 

“So should I add them to the list of people we’ll be in debt to to get a clinic going in the bookstore?” Monty said, half jokingly. 

“I’m helping them on their quest to their God,” Koller said, the words sounding ridiculous to himself. 

He finally added on. “the deal I made with Josef should be no trouble to us.” 

“Oh, well that means I’m underlining in twice,” He said, half joking. He didn’t like dealing with religious types. The stories he heard when he was a child of what his grandparents and great grantparents had gone through, taken from the community and put in schools to be Christianized, made him skeptical of belief in anything but the blood coursing through you and the metal and circuitry you chose to be. But if Vaclav, who he knew had an certain discomfort with faith, could trust them.. 

“… These were the people you stayed with after you and Ivan broke up, right?” Monty inquired, regarding his smaller, slightly younger companion who he’d made friends with by fighting over who got an aug someone left under a bridge, differently for it. 

“Yes – they… encouraged me when Ivan said, stop. I slept there, on the third floor, or at least talking excitedly about my theories for totally customizable programming in augments, many nights – They’re the only augmented community I can trust that came… from before yesterday. The others… gone, or could have been in on this….atrocity,” Koller finally found a word, his tone hardening and his jaw clenching as they climbed over the train tracks, still devoid of inbound traffic to the station. 

“You surely don’t believe anyone here was involved.” 

Koller shrugged weakly. “I’m going to be careful who I trust. I can – tolerate the Church.” 

Patty called over the infolink all of a sudden, startling Koller. 

“Are you on your way back?” She asked nervously. 

“Yes, tell the Berks I’ve arranged an arm. What’s up?” 

“I keep my infolink channel open to get news notifications usually and… and news is starting to come in earnest. The… your President is dead, for one thing...” 

Koller squinted at the main streets they were avoiding with back paths, now finally some level of emergency services response able to do anything effectively. “Zofie Ruzicka? That is… sad,” he said, not able to grapple with the meaning of it politically for now. But there were enough even in her cabinet who did not like augmented, that this shift could be a rough upheavel of the order of things. Monty glanced at him when he heard the name and idlely wondered about the state of his own immigration papers. 

Koller tried to console Patty over the link best he could, which wasn’t particularly well, especially as he was distracted. Eventually they closed the channel, as Koller promised they’d be there soon, don’t worry. 

“President Ruzicka died apparently,” Koller said after a moment of silence. 

“I’m not surprised. Half her drivers and security were augs,” Monty replied. 

“It suddenly places us in a less politically stable area though – I don’t like this...” 

“Koller, look around. Stop trying to run from reality. No matter what, things would change.” 

Silence as they approached the Berks’ house. 

“… I know, but,” Koller started and then couldn’t finish. His mind was overwhelmed trying to process everything that has changed, or will change.


	3. Augment Outlaws

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First you identify the need. Then you acquire the resources. Then you understand the costs to do that are more than you could ever store on a credit chip. 
> 
> Koller wasn't thinking of that. Koller knew what they needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional TW for this chapter -- relative misgendering another relative. 
> 
> Bit shorter chapter than usual.

Vaclav knocked at the front door, and Melissa greeted him, moderately calmer than she had been. 

“I made some lunch – Oh, hello,” she said, nodding to Monty, noticing the arm slung over his shoulder. 

“Monty, Melissa, it’s a shame you couldn’t meet in a better time,” Koller said as they filed into the house. 

“No fault of his or mine,” she said bizarrely, so calmly. 

“Listen, Vaclav,” she said a bit under her breath. “Please stay here tonight. I think… you being here is good for Ivan right now. He’s a little… far away. I know you have so much to do, but, I mean… We do have the empty garage, people could come here if they… need repairs,” she pled, hurting Koller’s heart a bit. 

“I’ll stay, Mel,” he said simply. Ivan lit up when he saw Koller come in, and installing the replacement was almost… fun. It was quick work for Vaclav, of course, but it felt normal – old limb off, new one on, make some adjustments, test for neural reception. 

He tried to sleep over the next couple days at the Berks, he really did. But once word traveled enough that he was there, augs were coming under the cover of darkness at all hours of the night, to try to dodge the military martial law that had mobilized. Begging for a fix, whether for a broken augment or a dose of neuropozyne. All the while they were developing plans to liberate tools for the clinic from the LIMB, hospitals, and of course… all the components in the apartment near the Red Queen. He’d only received a single message from a Dvali, his brother. It was a cold string of slurs and curses that broke off into a sob before cutting out. 

After the police presence had cooled down a bit, a small crew of the MachineGod’s faithful, Monty, and Vaclav got in through an employees entrance at the clinic. While they were packing up devices for x-rays, robotic arms for surgical use, and anything else not nailed down, Koller returned to the front lobby. The corpses had been removed, mostly, and the front entranced was barred and nailed shut. He pocketed few more doses of neuropozyne and found a email that the primary surgeon at the clinic had received… It appeared to be while he had been taking his leave. Telling them to leave. That they’d be collecting the equipment that was now being snatched. The people who worked there wouldn’t have abandoned the place… he found himself agonizing inside once, wondering how it was they had been killed. If Darrow would do what he did… what more would be ordering disobedient employees to be terminated?

Vaclav leaned shakily against the wall, dizzy with his chest tightening under his binder he’d neglected to take off for ages now, no doubt a greater trouble for someone without mechanically augmented and reinforced ribs. 

For a moment he imagined the all the brutal ways it could have ended. Then he realized they had to get moving if they were going to be able to clean out the Dvali apartment. It wasn’t too far away, but he had the Mehaniks park a bit farther away. And he went in alone. You didn’t bring others around. 

He went through the belongings he’d left there, modular arms he’d designed for a wide range of specialized tasks he designed to run as plug and play, from arms designed to let him lift enormous loads to arms so spindly and delicate he could – and had – performed open surgery on himself using them, and grabbing a few items simply practical or sentimental; his computer, some posters… a few items of Anicka’s he couldn’t bear to part with. He grabbed the chip he stored his emergency credits on from under a cushion, certain they’d be spent in days trying to outfit the clinic. He didn’t want to linger, and that desire was well founded when he found Elias’s gun aimed square at his face when he turned to leave with overburdened arms. 

“Eli,” Koller began, widening his stance in case his brother charged him. 

“You got her killed, you fucker, couldn’t be happy any of the way you were born, and she trusted you,” Elias growled. 

“Elias, please – I’ve been blaming myself for days.” 

Elias pulled the pistol upward and cocked before returning its focus to his older brother. “Half my crew was killed! Ani! How can you be coming in here to take your stupid toys,” he demanded, his petulant familial rage turned up as high as his naked, vulnerable grief. Vaclav, meanwhile, was detaching his right arm – an above-the-elbow prosthesis – to switch it out with one of the ones he picked up. 

“I have orders from Masa Kadlek,” he say, refamiliarizing himself silently with the weight of what he once nicknamed the “iron fist” augment. “If you make her angry, the dumpster I’m sure you wanna throw my body in will probably contain yourself instead,” he said without a trace of humor. Elias lowered the pistol, confused, frustrated, but most likely afraid of ruining the plans of a general like Kadlek. 

“If – If you come to Anicka’s burial you’ll be the second Koller girl buried there,” he sneered weakly, trying to find any angle to get under Vaclav’s skin.

“I just needed to get some things. Keep your damned head down and you won’t see me again,” Koller said sternly. “Get me my medicine from the bathroom and I’ll leave you in this empty house. Having a gun shoved at my head by my kid brother 6 times was more than enough for me.” When Elias tried to protest, Vaclav pulled his right arm backwards, a small engine revving behind the weight of the prepared punch. Elias demurred and returned with a plastic bag full of vials, pills, tubes of creams, and the last stock of neuropozyne he needed to collect. 

“Relay a message to Radich’s pakhan to pass to Radich: We have to talk. I outrank you, you footsoldier, so just do it.” 

He didn’t wait to see if Elias had anything else to say. He simply didn’t care. He wasn’t the people Koller had to protect now. 

Monty met him on the edge of the territory. Koller acknowledged him but didn’t stop walking, not turning his head to look back as Monty grabbed from his arms some of the materials scavenged from what had not so long ago been his home. 

“Hey, got a lot of the old crap from there, huh?” Monty said almost cheerfully. “I was getting worried.” 

Koller stared dead straight forward, counting the cobblestones mentally by mapping the road using his cranial augment. He got to 57 before Monty interrupted, which was pretty quickly. The cranial processing unit could calculate remarkably quickly in tandem with his own brain. 

“Talk to me, V,” Monty took almost everything else from his arms as he pled. “Look at me, V.” 

He strode purposefully forward, unfolding and snapping the single thing remaining in his arms onto his form in a fluid motion. A white coat, part of his old LIMB uniform. Then, as quick as he sheathed himself in it, he crossed his arms over the front and his hand's grip tightening, dark metal grasping around white fabric at the elbow, before yanking in an abrupt motion. Monty stopped in shock, watching from behind, his friend back lit solely from a street light ahead on the walkway, as Koller ripped the left sleeve off, giving his left arm augment freer movement, perfectly separating it at the shoulder seams. He gathered the remains in one hand and dropped it in a trash bin. Then, just as surely, ripped the LIMB patch on the breast pocket and tossing it to the garbage. 

“Come on. It’s going to take a lot of work to make the bookstore presentable. After all, we have to have a shopwarming party,” He joked in a duller but somewhat lighter tone than he’d been speaking in tonight. He didn’t look at Monty. 

“Yeah – got it, V. They got the truck up here. We'll get it in shape.” 

Vaclav didn't look back.


End file.
